Non-disclosure of a 777X non-disclosure agreement

Update: As noted by a commenter below, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has obtained the Boeing request for proposals and has a fairly detailed account of it.

Like you, we’re dying to know what’s in the request for proposals that the Boeing Co. has sent to some dozen or so states that might be interested in having an airplane factory. But Boeing has required respondents to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and so far no one who has seen the RFP has been willing to leak it.

Public-records laws vary by state. Some officials have been unwilling to even confirm the existence of Boeing’s three-page request for financial incentives and other favors that might inspire them to build the new 777X outside Washington.

We went through the motions ourselves. And the state Department of Commerce in Olympia summarily denied, of course, our request to see the RFP — even the NDA.

So the RFP cannot be disclosed. The non-disclosure agreement cannot be disclosed. About all the state of Washington can tell us, officially, is that Boeing exists. We’re not even allowed to know how much Boeing pays in state taxes, as this report by public-radio reporter Austin Jenkins explains.

In other 777X news:

Aerospace analyst Scott Hamilton explores an interesting notion — that by shopping the 777X around after the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) rejected a contract extension, Boeing might inspire another NLRB complaint.

You might have heard that Machinists in Missouri had said they would have accepted the offer Boeing made to the IAM in Washington. The head of the union there says that’s a bunch of hooey.